Quest for Company
by rhead-a-holyc
Summary: She often wondered why she was the one that felt the loneliness so keenly.


**Camp Potter II - First Aid, Week II**

**"We can never starve our loneliness. We can only hope that, by the company of others, it doesn't devour us."- Christopher Poindexter**

**Quest for Company**

She heard the door slam behind her. She hadn't meant to _slam_ the door, she had just pushed the door a _bit_ harder than she really should have. It wasn't that she was angry.

_Really,_ she wasn't. She was just frustrated.

She was frustrated with Ron, who never seemed to want to do anything other than Quidditch. She was frustrated with herself, and how she was never able to stop the fragile silence from shattering every single time.

She was frustrated with the loneliness she felt, because she wasn't alone. _Ron_ was always there, but he never seemed to be paying attention. Not to what she was saying. It was almost as if it wouldn't matter whether she was there or not.

It was a similar feeling to how she had felt in primary school, when all the children left her out. She had been painfully lonely then. No one had cared. So she had lost herself in her books, the only things that she had left. She had disappeared into a brightly lit corner for hours, reading, before anyone had thought to look for her.

It wasn't the same though. If she disappeared now, she was sure Ron would come looking. She didn't know how long it would take, but she knew he would be bothered enough to care more than her classmates did in primary school.

That didn't stop her from wanting to grab a book and find a cosy corner to settle in. It was her first urge whenever she felt lonely. It was almost habit by now, the most comforting actions she knew, and had cultivated it from childhood. Her parents had encouraged it, so she continued.

Today was one of the few days where the door to the garden had been closer than the door to the library, and she had wanted to get out of the room as fast as she could as if that would stop the loneliness. She knew that it wouldn't but that didn't stop her from trying to run away from it anyway.

The garden never helped though, watching the wind blow the grass didn't stop her from feeling isolated. The grass all moved together after all. The birds were usually found in pairs, as were most of the insects.

"Hermione?"

She turned around, and saw Ron standing awkwardly near the door.

"Ron?"

"Are you okay?"

He came to sit next to her on the stairs. He was close enough to be comforting, but far enough that he didn't make her feel suffocated.

She didn't know how Ron did it. In his thoughtless way, he was always able to be by her side when she felt her worst. It was almost as if he felt an impulse to join her, to stave away her loneliness, in the moments when she felt truly alone.

"Yeah, I'm fine."

"Are you sure?"

Usually it would annoy her to have to answer the same question twice, but now it only gave her a warm feeling in her chest. It meant someone cared enough to know that she wasn't entirely fine.

"Yes, Ron, I'm fine."

He nodded, accepting her answer, and stood before dusting himself off and disappearing back inside the house leaving her alone again. The momentary feeling of being part of something left with him, taking the warmth she had felt earlier with it.

Sometimes she wondered why she could never hold on to that feeling, why she seemed to hold on to the feeling on loneliness in a way she did very few other things.

She often wondered why she was the one that felt the loneliness so keenly. There were many people who were probably lonelier than she was, yet did not feel as lonely as she did. She didn't know if it was just her, or whether other people just covered their loneliness up better than she did, but she knew she would not wish it on anyone.

Not the suffocating loneliness that threatened every waking moment, clinging to everything in reach, but she would not allow the loneliness to make her falter.

She was Hermione Granger, the _stubborn_ Hermione Granger that stuck to her beliefs no matter what.

Loneliness couldn't stop her.


End file.
